Media as Practice: Narrative and Conceptual Approach for Qualitative Data Analysis
Pilar Lacasa, Rut Martinez-Borda, Laura Mendez
2013
Studies in Media and Communication
This paper considers videogames as meaningful media in interactive and everyday contexts. In order to show our theoretical and methodological perspective for approaching media as practice, we analyze how a commercial video game, Tomb Raider: Cronicles, could be present in several scenarios. The research focuses on how to understand media in context by combining two modes of thought: the narrative, or the use of stories, and the conceptual, or the use of categorical concepts. We have adopted an
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... thnographical and action research perspective inspired by sociocultural psychology. Our starting point is the concept of narrative considered as an object and method of research. On the one hand, we analyze the way in which a cultural narrative, Lara Croft's story as presented in a game, is introduced in the classroom. On the other hand, we show how narratives, complemented by conceptual analysis, turn into a methodological instrument that helps to analyze the meanings that the participants attribute to the game. Our data comes from a workshop where the research team, acting as participant observers, collaborated with a teacher and her primary school students in Spain. The paper examines two levels of analysis in some detail in order to show how narrative and conceptual thinking can be combined, from a dialectical point of view, in order to understand media as tools that take part in situated activities. 133 multimedia educational setting, a context that allows us to talk about the media as practice. Our general aim is to show the decisions, made from a methodological approach, and to analyze the process that takes place in the classroom. The teacher and the research team collaborate to design innovative learning contexts by using a commercial video game, Tomb Raider, and turn it into an educational instrument with the idea of favouring children's acquisition of new literacies. We aim to find a methodology that helps to understand the interaction of the environment, which now includes a commercial game, with the gamers, both students and teachers who attribute specific meanings depending on the context of the game, which in this case happens to be the school. Objectives Ethnographic research begins with one or several questions that guide the work. These questions may change or be modified, and new questions may be formulated taking the initial ones as a starting point. The research goals are generated from these, which are the following in this case: Determining how, from a methodological perspective, two approaches (analysis and narrative interpretation) can be combined. Analyzing the meaning that a commercial video game takes for participants in the context of the game (a classroom) in which participants interact in a formal educational setting. Exploring how the students' interaction with the game affects the construction of their oral narratives, providing a critical approach to the narrative of the game and its rules.
doi:10.11114/smc.v1i2.231
fatcat:evgbyhj4bbcjvh54lhdxidyoke